I looked at the implementation of a linked list in the Python book above, there it's done with objects instead of pointers. To be honest, the idea of pointers seems to be more straightforward in this case: one node "points" to the next, while the idea of an object seems a little abstract to me. It took me a moment to understand that an object is just a memory location (pointer) to "something", and it's less clear what that "something" is. It probably took me just as long to see the relationships between a pointer and an array or a struct when I was learning C, but I'm afraid at this point, to understand Python data structures I have to mentally translate them to C data structures.